Rockaway

by Tara Ison

  But there was never any hope for this painting, she realizes, not from the exact second she started it. It’s a blank canvas that’s full of promise. An unstained, unscarred canvas hasn’t been attempted and ruined and failed at yet. The insult, the sin, is what she has both done and hasn’t done to this canvas, and it is too late to start over, time is up, it’s all over, too late.

  She regrips the knife, makes a lunging slash at the canvas; it shudders on its easel, but there’s no rip, no tear. She grabs the frame in her other hand to steady it, tries a stab, and this time she stabs through, punctures the canvas so hard her hand slams deep, bruisingly, against her shell; she drops the knife and uses her fingers and hands to rip more, rip harder and wide, skinning her knuckles and tearing the canvas into shreds.

  She is panting for breath. But still the simmer, the boil.

  She gathers up the tubes of paint, clutching them to her chest like tiny nursing rodents, and hurries downstairs to the kitchen, dumps them on the counter. She kicks the main trashcan out from behind the door. She unscrews a tube of alizarin crimson and squeezes, gasps, no matter how accurately the tubes are color-labeled, so you think you know exactly the shade, the tint, the value you’re getting, there’s always a shock when you see it, see the richness of it. A good shock. Like the difference between blood sealed inside the branching blue lines on your wrist, your thighs, the tender inner flesh of your arms, and the abrupt vivid happy red of it when released.

  The paint coils in thick strings into the trashcan. She touches a finger to it, swipes it across the back of her hand like a lipstick trial. She opens a tube of ultramarine blue, squeezes it all out carefully from the bottom, adds a smear of blue to her skin. Pretty. She releases a tube of cadmium yellow after it. Good. The primary colors, like a circus. She starts on the secondary colors, the tertiary colors, all the colors on the wheel. The color wheel, Ferris-wheel-spinning in her head. One by one she empties out tube after tube. The colors’ moist coils weigh down the trashcan’s plastic liner, settle into sedimentary layers. She looks, thrusts her hands in, breathing hard. A bold, clashing, dirty mess, yes.

  SHE TRUDGES DOWN the brilliant white span of beach as far from the water and oily, screaming flock of beachgoers as she can get. The hot sand humps itself over and over in small mock dunes, and her sandaled feet sink into it, making the walk harder.

  She feels thick-mouthed, plastered with heat. There is nothing colder than the sun at its height in the summer, Pissarro said that once, or Renoir, something about how hard it is to paint snow, that nature is colored in winter and cold in the summer. Whatever. I ought to have put sunscreen on, she thinks, but then remembers something she read once, that most skin damage occurs during childhood, anyway. That’s when cancer starts. It just takes so long to grow, turn lethal. And by then it’s too late.

  A reclined and glistening group of cocoa-buttered, seal-brown teenage girls in string bikinis look oddly at her as she stumbles past, but she can’t imagine why.

  Marty’s door is slightly ajar, the screen closed but not locked. She taps quietly, then again, louder.

  “Hello?” she calls. “Hello?”

  There’s no answer, no sound from inside. She doesn’t know what else to call. It’s Sarah is too formal, It’s me too assuming, presumptuous. Maybe he isn’t even home, maybe he’s out strolling. There’s a pebble in her sandal. The walk here has left her sweaty; her face hurts from squinting out the sun, her skin is at blister range. She is so thirsty. She wants some water, clear icy water. No, she wants a crystal, silver-filigreed glass of iced vodka, yes, just touched sweet pink with apricot schnapps. How lovely that would be. She wants a bath of it to crawl into, to cool her and soothe. The inside hallway looks soft and dark. Past the hall, into the dining room, she sees the two lighted white candles on the table, left to burn down. She hears murmuring, more than one voice. She takes off her sandals and leaves them on the step, then opens the screen door and enters, closing it quietly behind her.

  “Hello?”

  She turns into the murky living room, toward the murmuring. A group stands in silhouette against the window. Her eyes adjust, and she makes out Marty, his height, his longish hair, dressed in an inky suit and black velvet, gold-threaded yarmulke shaped like a pillbox hat. He is standing with Itzak and six, seven, nine other men, a black-clothed and bearded blur, their white tzitzit fringes hanging from under their coats like tampon strings. They hold books the size of bricks, Hebrew letters spiking and cramming the pages like nails stuffed in a box. A minyan, a quorum of men for prayers. It looks like a meeting of Amish Elders, a council of Puritan Magistrates assembled to try the town witch. They’ve come to burn her, press her to death with stones, drown her in a murky pond. Their bone black clothing absorbs all the light in the room, and she feels unable to breathe.

  “Excuse me,” she says. “I’m sorry,” she says, taking a step back. She stumbles. Tries to balance.

  Marty sees her and his face blinks in surprise. “Hi,” he says, slowly.

  “Hi.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “I got back,” she says.

  “Wow,” he says. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she says. “I’m good. I’m great. I’m just thirsty.”

  “What happened to you?” His eyes flicker over her, and she looks down at her arms, her chest—she’s mottled with paint. Her arms, chest, shoulders. Still wet, oily. Her hands are gloved with it.

  “Nothing,” she says. “Look.” She holds her hands out to him, as if supplicating. “I was painting. I finished painting. I’m finished. See?”

  “Good. That’s good, but . . .” He looks confused, takes a step forward. “Are you sure?”

  “Nothing. I just . . . had to get out of the house. Get away. Now that it’s done. I wanted to celebrate.”

  “Hello, Sarah,” Itzak says. He smiles at her, drifting his fingers through his beard. The other men nod, and several of them go back to praying. Their mumblings rise and fall, a minor key, she remembers that, Frankie trying to teach her about music and harmonics. How the notes relate to each other, complement each other, something like that.

  “Hello,” she says primly. She wishes Frankie were here instead, with Tony and Sammy. She misses their fun, the light of their Mafioso jostling. The coolness in the room raises gooseflesh on her painted arms, the backs of her thighs. She sees her nipples poking through her bikini top. She crosses her arms in front of her, feeling indecent. Immodest. Tzenius, she remembers. She should have covered up. She wishes she were coated in a thicker, more opaque layer, a carapace of paint. She digs her bare toes into the carpeting.

  “How’s your friend?” Marty asks.

  “Fine. If I ever had a baby, I’d have it at home. I’m a total disciple now.”

  “She was the doula,” he informs Itzak. “Her friend had a baby at home, with a midwife. Beautiful, huh?”

  “Ah,” says Itzak.

  She watches Itzak’s hand stroking his beard, finds it oddly sexual. She shifts her weight, looks back to Marty. “And we lit candles on Friday nights,” Sarah tells him. “Emily taught me the prayers in Hebrew.”

  His face brightens in pleasure. “That’s good.”

  “The blessing over candles and the blessing over wine.” But it doesn’t mean anything to me, she thinks, nothing at all.

  “I’m glad.” He nods happily at her. “See, that’s good.”

  “It was really beautiful,” she says, “the light, the prayers.” Empty ritual, just dead words, rote words. Phylum Molluska, Mytilus Edulis.

  “That’s good for you,” he says. “I think that’s really good for you.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “So, hey—“ Marty begins.

  “No, I know,” she says. “I just wanted to say hi. I knew you couldn’t call, so . . . I’ll just see you—”

  “No, wait a minute.”

  “I’ll see you later sometime.”

  “No, come on. Don’t le
ave.”

  And where are you going to put me? she wants to ask. Where is it you think I can go?

  He separates fully from the group of praying men, approaching her. “Come on, come up here,” he says, indicating she should go upstairs.

  “All right,” she says. “Bye,” she says back to Itzak. She begins to climb.

  “We hope to see you next Friday, Sarah,” Itzak says. “We’ll have you say the blessings.”

  “Oh,” she says. “I don’t know them very well.”

  “‘Every act carried out in sanctity is a road to the heart of the world’,” he quotes to her.

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “‘God’s radiance glows in all human beings’,” he continues. “‘But it does not shine in its full brightness within them. Only between them.’”

  She rubs at her arms, smearing, coating herself. “Of course.”

  “That’s good,” Marty says to Itzak. “I’ll give her that to read.”

  “So, come Friday,” Itzak says to her. “We’ll have margaritas and argue Buber. You can bring fruit.” He returns to the other men, still caressing his wisps of beard.

  Marty follows her up the stairs. She expects to feel his hand on her back, as if he’s worried she might fall. But he doesn’t touch her at all.

  “Are you mad at me?” she asks over her shoulder.

  “No,” he says. “Why would I be mad at you?” They arrive at his bedroom. “Just stay here,” he says. “We’re going to shul again, and then I’ll come back.”

  “You’ll come back?”

  “Yeah, I’ll come back. Don’t touch anything. Maybe you should get some sleep, or something.”

  “So, I can stay here? That’s okay?”

  “Yeah. Just stay here.” He motions stay here with his hands, and starts to leave.

  “I really do get what Itzak said,” she tells his back. “It’s like music, right? Or color? It’s the same thing, it’s how the notes and colors connect with each other that makes them beautiful. You just have to get the combinations right. Find the harmony.”

  “Yeah,” he says. He stops, looks back at her, pleased. “It’s like that.”

  “And remember you and I talked once, about how every act should be done with the consciousness of God?” He nods, listening, pleased. This is awful, what she’s doing, she knows. Using God like bait. “And you said yeah, if there even is a God. But that everything you do has to create that communion. Remember?” Something to hold him, make him want to hold her.

  “Yeah, I remember,” he says. “That was a good day.”

  “And I told you I thought the angels would bless you. And that made you happy. Remember?” A spiritual striptease, trying to lure with a flash of soul. She feels ashamed of herself. He smiles at her, but he still doesn’t touch her.

  “I really get all of that now.”

  “Maybe you should take a bath,” he says.

  She looks down at herself again, at all the colors. Well, no, she realizes. She’s smeared herself to mud, really, the final, neutral gray of overmixed colors, valueless and turbid as dirt. “A bath?”

  He enters his bathroom and turns on the bathtub’s gold, fluted spigots. A cloud of water blasts out. “You need a bath. You need to clean up. Go on.” He nods, smiles gently at her, again, and leaves.

  SHE FINDS THE vodka in the freezer, among bags of frozen chopped spinach and green beans, a cardboard box of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda, and three packages of Tabatchnick Cabbage Soup. His kitchenware is split in two sections, labeled with masking tape: fleischig in cabinets and drawers on the left, milchig on the right. She selects a big milchig tumbler, and pours. She drinks the glass down halfway. Why bother with the schnapps, she thinks, it’s so pretty this way, so clean and clear and cold. So pure. She pours again to the top, and replaces the vodka in the freezer. She leaves oily gray smudges.

  Upstairs, she tips a glass bowl of scallop-shaped soaps into the filling tub. She adds the contents of a bottle or two of bath gel from the wire basket, and presses on the Jacuzzi jets. The water churns madly. She takes off her clothes and steps into the foaming tub; she sits down cross-legged in the bubbles, drinking from her tumbler of vodka and rubbing at her arms. This won’t do it, she thinks. I need turpentine, naphtha. She plucks a washcloth from a folded pile on the tub’s marble ledge and scrubs away at her gray-smeared skin. She swallows more vodka. A pumice stone, something to strip away a layer. She spots a loofah in the wire basket and scours her arms. Maybe if I soak longer. Maybe I need something more. She swallows more vodka, gets out of the tub and inspects the cabinet beneath the marble sink. Isopropyl alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, a cylindrical can of Ajax, good, maybe that will help. She dusts the bathwater heavily with it, splatting the bubbles flat, and gets back in to soak. Maybe if the water’s hotter. She turns off the cold spigot, lets the hot water flow. She imagines Marty coming back from shul and finding her still in the tub, gleaming and purified. The fumes from the blistering steam sting her nose, but the icy vodka is so cool in her throat. She leans back, closes her eyes, sips. Her milchig tumbler, milk, that’s how the vodka tastes, like cold cold milk on a hot summer day, drinking milk and being eight years old, being breastless, clean-fleshed, with lemon-bright hair falling to her knees. She imagines Marty coming home and finding her like that, back at the beginning, getting in the tub with her, bathing her. She sees them curled up together in his creamy, black-veined marble tub, floating together in an albescent clamshell at the top of a cloudy, uncrashed wave. He straps them in so they’ll be safe, he tells her, they’re taking a whimsical Playland ride, a spinning Ferris wheel, Hold on, hold on, and she wants to reassure him, No, this is safe for real, being together, being here with you. She drinks more milk and raises her arms to take off Marty’s black cap, and he lets her, tipping his head into her neck. The cap slides off to reveal a space of pure, fluid light, no skin, no skull, no hair. The entry to his soul, open and radiant and welcoming, tinted to pearl by angels, just for her. The light pours from him to cover them both, a liquid, beautiful light. It fills the clamshell with blessing, with warmth, lulls her to a shade of home.

  “HEY,” SHE DIMLY hears him say.

  She rubs her eyes. It’s evening air in the room, air that’s been breathed in and exhaled, heated all day but just starting to cool. She’s on the bed, sprawled out naked under the top sheet.

  “What time is it?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. Maybe seven, eight. After shul we went back to Itzak’s. We had Havdalah.” He’s still wearing his velvet and gold pillbox yarmulke. The candles downstairs must have burnt out by now, she thinks. She watches him take off his suit jacket, unbuckle his belt.

  “You said you’d come back,” she says.

  “I didn’t know you’d still be here,” he says.

  “But you told me to stay here. You said I could stay.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know.”

  “So, you stayed there in case I wasn’t here?” This makes no sense to her. He sits on the edge of the bed to take off his black leather shoes. He smells like onion, like wax burnt off to smoke, like other men in black suits. When I am fifty-four he will be seventy-eight, she thinks, he will be decrepit, riddled with disease, and I will have to devote myself to taking care of him. She cannot decide if she feels panic at this, or relief.

  “I was sleeping.”

  “Good.”

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No. Hold on.” He goes into his bathroom, and she hears his footsteps stop. “What’d you do in here? What happened?”

  “You told me to take a bath.”

  “Wow.”

  She hears the sink tap running, the toilet flush, the gurgle of liquid deep in a throat. He reenters the bedroom in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and now a little black knit cap. He gets under the sheet next to her, wafting mint and baby powder, tugging at her arm. “Come here.”

  She rolls over obediently, tucks herself against him. He pulls her arm to lie across his che
st like a rib. “Shabbes is over,” she says.

  “Yeah.” He looks down at her; the skin of arm, her shoulders and chest is still flaked with stubborn gray paint, but raw-looking, inflamed. “What is this? What did you do to yourself?”

  “I tried to get it all off,” she says. “But I’m clean, really. Good as new. I swear.” She presses against him, stretches up, whispers into his ear. “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No.” He holds her tighter, and she angles her head toward him. When he kisses her, his mouth is soft, too casual. She wishes he would grip her harder, try to draw something out of her. She wishes he felt more urgency, need. She reaches down between them, slides her hand into his boxer shorts, feels he is already hard, good, and she wants him harder, affected. She wants him stricken with her. His hand slides down over her hips, but before his fingers can reach her, she knows she’s still dry, she scrambles on top of him, pushing him on his back. She draws his shorts down, and takes him in her mouth. The best smell of him is there, the savory ripe leather of him; she works her tongue over him, her fingers gripping him slickly at his base, trying to inhale, absorb, whatever she can. But his hands in her hair are keeping her just enough back, off of him. She wants to make him come this way. His hands are over her ears, but she hears his jolted breathing, good, she wants him to come in her mouth, she’ll draw him in that way, swallow all the light.